politics, theory, action

Posts categorized "Ideas"

April 25, 2017

So what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an "and" - as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal? In relation to what is the political concatenation organized? Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated - even if they might not be so popular? And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains, than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?

October 05, 2016

"The theme for her show was “Invisible Clothes.” And in seeming contradiction to that idea, she offered some of the most outsize, extreme and extraordinary notions: kilts that were as enormous as a tent, trousers that could hold a veritable crowd within a single leg and a giant hood that took on the proportions of a sarcophagus. This wasn’t so much a line of clothes destined for your closet as it was a statement for the season — for the times."

"There were elements to these clothes that recalled past Kawakubo collections, such as their flatness, which reduces them to two-dimensions, their almost monstrous size and the sheer discombobulating nature of them. They are not, in literal terms, invisible.

In these enormous creations, you can often make out the silhouette of the body even as the garments extend far beyond it. It’s as if a child has pulled the bed sheets over his head and declared himself invisible even though the shape of his body can be seen beneath the blankets."

November 22, 2015

This post is a result of frustration with Todd Gitlin's editorial in today's NYT. I can't stand his self-serving invocation of '68. No student protests or radical political efforts since '68 ever measure up to his rosy-tinted glory days and he is always happy to tell us why. This time it is because the protesters are complaining about vulnerability and movements don't win unless people are strong. Gitlin's basic move is bizarre: the students at Missouri won. Their football team put their economic power in the university to work as political power. Students all over the country this week put their universities on notice, occupied spaces, opening up another round of discussions of racism in colleges and universities . This doesn't seem like a story well-described with a headline about protesters' fear.

That said, the rhetoric of safe spaces, vulnerability, and civility does seem part of the current moment. Why? Gitlin too quickly dismisses political economic considerations -- the enormity of student debt, diminished economic prospects, loss of rewarding work, and intensified financial insecurity facing this generation of students. He notes, only to discard, the surveillance part of contemporary life. I think these political economic factors are more important than Gitlin allows. They establish the terms through which the students are voicing their critique. Students frame their opposition in a language of safety and vulnerability because that is the language available to them after forty years of neoliberalism and in the second decade of the war on terror.

The new left stood on the shoulders of the old left they sought to defeat. Available to them was a rhetoric of class struggle, equality, strategy, and solidarity. Contemporary students come into a different university, one focused, first, on profits, individual success, efficiency, and the victory of the strongest and, second, on safety, security, and comfort. They are taught that what matters is their individual psychic, physical, and emotional health. They have to defend themselves, take care of themselves, listen to themselves. If they don't no one else will. So they are pushing back against a university system that they experience as hostile, damaging, unhealthy.

Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.

The university concentrates the tensions of the larger society: competition v. security, profits v. comfort. When every space is a site of struggle -- to get that job, that A, that recommendation, that attractive mate, that sports victory -- no space is safe (that students in Texas can carry guns is an extreme illustration of this point). The university tries to promise to its customers a safety it cannot provide because it's impossible, particularly under capitalist conditions. Capitalism requires losers, victims, an exploited underclass, a reserve army of the unemployed, and, more pointedly, those who ruthless enough to cut, fire, and coerce.

When every course or offering requires an economic justification (the proliferation of "leadership" as a buzzword is one odious example), cultivating reflection, respect, understanding, and the languages of critique seems an expense few can afford. The university either cuts them entirely or the students in these courses realize the fundamental tension between the course and the university itself: will getting a good grade in theories of social justice make a difference in the job market?

Students are using a vocabulary of safety and vulnerability because that is the one that registers in contemporary culture. Since 9/11 they've seen that it works. Need resources? Highlight a security threat. There's always money for weapons and police.

The critical language of too much of the academic left amplifies the appeal of a critical language of vulnerability: grievable lives, mourning, melancholia, exclusion, failure, the rejection of power, the potential of any term, act, norm, or demand to harm and exclude.

What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.

That said, there is a risk in the current struggles-- and it has nothing to do with a threat to free speech as the liberals would have it. The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.

I don't think the current wave of protests will end up in this position for two reasons. First, such protection is impossible -- it exceeds the boundaries of the university. From the changing climate to the barbarous economy, the university can't shore itself up against the society it includes and reproduces. The more it tries, the more caught up it gets in the contradictions of struggle and safety. Second, and consequently, efforts to meet students' demands by strengthening administrative authority reveal the impossibility as the incompatibility between capitalism and the promise of a decent, humane life on which the university relies. Decent, humane life, equal life, solidary life, responsive life, requires remaking the university, using it as a base camp in a struggle for society against capitalism -- in other words, cultural revolution.

November 07, 2015

The endlessly visible glut of information online has not disciplined us. As online subjects we have not been afraid of being tracked, even as we become more aware of who and how our metadata is being collected, and this lack of fear has not produced disciplined subjects. Artist Hito Steyerl articulates with striking insight how relentless the drive towards online presence has become. As we increasingly produce endless amounts of visual and verbal statements to validate our digital existence, we are

… realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight; you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface43

It seems certain that even if it were possible for images to truly reveal something about their referents, the aspiration toward transparency is a trap. The Internet has wrought a kind of “opacity in broad daylight” as Steyerl claims, where anything we want to see is visible but meaningless. How then does such a critique of the assumed transparency of the public sphere press itself into artworks, and photographic practices specifically? The concern is not for artworks that attempt to visualize the invisible or hidden but that must address the problem that visibility itself is an ideology, one powerfully tied to the contemporary global order. A critique of transparency then seems possible only when artworks are considered beyond the formal, aesthetic frames of the image.

In the years following 9/11 questions around the limitations of visual representation have been widely addressed, and the role and power of images interrogated.44 However, the parameters of this inquiry seem to now be shifting. As photographs are increasingly freed from their role as representational objects and are now digital processes, images have become an important component of global networks of communication and dissemination that are operative beyond vision. Image production now happens automatically, or sometimes algorithmically. Images that we might think we have ownership over are no longer truly ours; we have relinquished our rights to images for the ease of transmission and communication offered by image-based social networks. Within a hyper-visual environment, the ways in which images are used and engaged has shifted so definitively away from the tangible, material of a printed photograph that we can no longer think of the photograph as a representation, as an index of an event or place.

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Whereas Rancière’s longstanding examination of the intersection of aesthetics and politics places him within a discourse that firmly roots questions of representation within questions of political violence,47 for Galloway the impossibility of representation is precisely that neither political nor aesthetic representation is ever possible. He identifies that “one of the key consequences of the control society is that we have moved from a condition in which singular machines produce proliferations of images, into a condition in which multitudes of machines produce singular images.”48 One camera does not produce many images, but many cameras (or computers, or smartphones) produce one image. This is a situation where photography no longer records an event but is instead a process or accumulation of many microevents; it does not track a unified point in time, it opens onto many. Photography is not the actual or metaphorical click of the shutter but is instead the instantaneous uploading, tagging, geotagging, searching, facial recognizing, networking, sharing, and filtering of images. This networked image landscape is one where innumerable machines produce not individual, varied, differentiated images but singular images, images that conform to societal codes and conventions.49 For Galloway this proves that “adequate visualizations of [the] control society have not happened. Representation has not happened. At least not yet.”50

Representation has a constitutive relationship with its mode of production, and such production is no longer based on a creator–apparatus–viewer relationship. It is increasingly evident that to make something or someone visible, to produce or make public from multiple sources a singular image is not to produce or generate power. In contrast, Galloway argues, “the point of unrepresentability is the point of power. And the point of power today is not in the image. The point of power today resides in networks, computers, algorithms, information, and data.”51

This is an unusual position since historically vision has been tied to representation through the image. But Galloway’s is an argument against the possibilities of visualization full stop. Where Butler and Azoulay might argue that the signs in the image cannot be considered in isolation from each other, that is they cannot be considered free-floating or unmoored from their referents and that they must actually mean something even if they do not appear to. For Galloway the signs, symbols and imagery that we use to attempt to make data visual, to attempt to make visual sense of so much unending, infinite data, can only appear to forge a relationship with any determined meanings. For him there seems to be little or no power in images, despite their massive proliferation. The generation of power resides in the notion that the image is a screen, which is a front for real power that exists in networks, algorithms, data sets, and relationships of information. These systems of power are yet to be made visual or visible in any meaningful way, and the attempt to make visual systems of power is indeed a pressing one. The question remains not only whether representation is possible, but also whether it can locate and visualize power at all, particularly when political and visual representation is being continually denied across many discourses.

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Returning to photographic art practices, it is clear that for Simon’s and Paglen’s projects to be made comprehensible in scope, there must be a way for the images to carry signification. As such, both Paglen and Simon use extended, detailed captioning to direct viewers outside the framed image by pushing against the very limitations imposed by the frame. To see one of their images without an understanding of the context of the project would be to reduce the image to aesthetics only, since the fuller and external spaces of the image would not be legible. Is one possibility for overcoming the failures of photographic representation to navigate between images and texts? Might the use of language also help to articulate questions around data, where language is once again achieving a place of primacy as users learn increasingly various coding languages in order to access different layers of digital communication software? For both Simon and Paglen, without the grounding of extended or specific captions the viewer would be speculating at the research, labour, or people that preceded the image. With the addition of the caption, the limits of each project become less abstract and more concrete. While resisting didactic meaning, both artists are navigate a line between revelation and concealment, between opacity and transparency and it is through the caption that this negotiated border becomes most discernable. Indeed, the troubling of the relationship between image and text is one that both Paglen and Simon hinge their practices on, since without the texts or captions, it would be impossible to assign meaning to these largely abstract images.

Photographic theorist and historian Geoffrey Batchen claims that the “interactive combination of text and photograph is typical of Taryn Simon’s work; it, rather than photography, is her true medium.”52

The tiny texts crafted to accompany the images are intentionally placed to be read in conjunction with the image, so that the two have equal weighting. This strategy “shifts the burden of assigning that meaning from the artist to a viewer, making us all complicit in the act of signification, and indeed in the histories we are asked to witness.”53 This is no small burden for the viewer, and this is precisely the type of responsibility in viewing that Azoulay’s civil contract of photography calls upon us to acknowledge. If the viewer is, as Batchen suggests, obliged to become complicit in the act of signification, then the question of what is knowable and seeable is an urgent one. The image reveals its contingencies not because the viewer can read anything into it, but it is a contingency based in part upon an individual being able to navigate between visual and linguistic texts. What results is “a photography that proffers transparency [and the] utopian promise of liberal democracy, but then renders that transparency opaque, even reflective.”54 Paglen and Simon may both “proffer transparency” in their working methodologies, but their highly aesthetic images hypnotize us with a luminous glow, obscuring more than they are able to reveal. It is precisely this dialectic between transparency and opacity that is operative in the negotiation of image and text. The caption must bring with it the political motivation of the image.

How then can we visualize subjects as wide ranging as border policing, surveillance systems, drone attacks, economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, late capitalism, global finance? This is the overarching question with which Paglen and Simon concern themselves, in projects that interrogate the limits of photography and representation during a contemporary moment where the definition of photography, as a medium, a practice, and a process, is in continual flux. While the images of such subjects come to be largely symbolic, when we attend to the images in context, through language or texts that point to outside sources, we begin to address the contingency of the image without being didactic. The questions addressed throughout this paper may appear specific to photography as an aesthetic and artistic practice, but ultimately they have much broader implications in an era that privileges communicational transparency to the point where certain freedoms and values are being severely limited. As visual forms of communication become the most prevalent forms of social media–and the trend towards imagesharing sites like Instagram and Tumblr offer evidence of this shift–the currency of this form of exchange is the ability to store and manipulate data in ever expanding, seamless, and seemingly invisible sites. How information is presented, represented, and understood in a networked era are questions only beginning to be fully addressed.

Hito Steyerl Let me give you one example. A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.

The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage. I haven’t even mentioned external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of applications are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled for whole regions. One could, for example, disable recording functions close to military installations, or conversely, live broadcast whatever you are up to. Similarly, the phone might be programmed to auto-pixellate secret or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW content or auto-modify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context or insert AR advertisement and pop up windows or live feeds. Now lets apply this shift to the question of representative politics or democracy. The representational paradigm assumes that you vote for someone who will represent you. Thus the interests of the population will be proportionally represented. But current democracies work rather like smartphone photography by algorithmically clearing the noise and boosting some data over other. It is a system in which the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database. It is about what to define as noise — something Jacques Ranciere has defined as the crucial act in separating political subjects from domestic slaves, women and workers. Now this act is hardwired into technology, but instead of the traditional division of people and rabble, the results are post-representative militias, brands, customer loyalty schemes, open source insurgents and tumblrs.

Additionally, Ranciere’s democratic solution: there is no noise, it is all speech. Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation. It certainly expresses something: a format, a protocol or executive order, but effectively obfuscates its meaning. This is a far cry from a situation in which something—an image, a person, a notion — stood in for another and presumably acted in its interest. Today it stands in, but its relation to whatever it stands in for is cryptic, shiny, unstable; the link flickers on and off. Art could relish in this shiny instability — it does already. It could also be less baffled and mesmerised and see it as what the gloss mostly is about – the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.

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MJ You have provided a compelling account of the depersonalization of the status of the image: a new process of de-identification that favors materialist participation in the circulation of images today. Within the contemporary technological landscape, you write that “if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.” How does this shift from personal identification to material circulation — that is, to cybernetic participation — affect your notion of representation? If an image is merely “a thing like you and me,” does this amount to saying that identity is no more, no less than a .jpeg file?

HS Social media makes the shift from representation to participation very clear: people participate in the launch and life span of images, and indeed their life span, spread and potential is defined by participation. Think of the image not as surface but as all the tiny light impulses running through fiber at any one point in time. Some images will look like deep sea swarms, some like cities from space, some are utter darkness. We could see the energy imparted to images by capital or quantified participation very literally, we could probably measure its popular energy in lumen. By partaking in circulation, people participate in this energy and create it. What this means is a different question though — by now this type of circulation seems a little like the petting zoo of plutotechnocracies. It’s where kids are allowed to make a mess — but just a little one — and if anyone organizes serious dissent, the seemingly anarchic sphere of circulation quickly reveals itself as a pedantic police apparatus aggregating relational metadata. It turns out to be an almost Althusserian ISA (Internet State Apparatus), hardwired behind a surface of ‘kawaii’ apps and online malls. As to identity, Heartbleed and more deliberate governmental hacking exploits certainly showed that identity goes far beyond a relationship with images: it entails a set of private keys, passwords, etc., that can be expropriated and detourned. More generally, identity is the name of the battlefield over your code — be it genetic, informational, pictorial. It is also an option that might provide protection if you fall beyond any sort of modernist infrastructure. It might offer sustenance, food banks, medical service, where common services either fail or don’t exist. If the Hezbollah paradigm is so successful it is because it provides an infrastructure to go with the Twitter handle, and as long as there is no alternative many people need this kind of container for material survival. Huge religious and quasi-religious structures have sprung up in recent decades to take up the tasks abandoned by states, providing protection and survival in a reversal of the move described in Leviathan. Identity happens when the Leviathan falls apart and nothing is left of the commons but a set of policed relational metadata, Emoji and hijacked hashtags. This is the reason why the gay AKP pornstar bots are desperately quoting Hobbes’ book: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (Israel Defense Forces) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP) and are hoping for just any entity to organize day care and affordable dentistry.

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But beyond all the portentous vocabulary relating to identity, I believe that a widespread standard of the contemporary condition is exhaustion. The interesting thing about Heartbleed — to come back to one of the current threats to identity (as privacy) — is that it is produced by exhaustion and not effort. It is a bug introduced by open source developers not being paid for something that is used by software giants worldwide. Nor were there apparently enough resources to audit the code in the big corporations that just copy-pasted it into their applications and passed on the bug, fully relying on free volunteer labour to produce their proprietary products. Heartbleed records exhaustion by trying to stay true to an ethics of commonality and exchange that has long since been exploited and privatized. So, that exhaustion found its way back into systems. For many people and for many reasons — and on many levels — identity is just that: shared exhaustion.

MJ This is an opportune moment to address the labor conditions of social media practice in the context of the art space. You write that “an art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket — a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike.” Incidentally, DIS launched a website called ArtSelfie just over a year ago, which encourages social media users to participate quite literally in “cellphone-video blogging” by aggregating their Instagram #artselfies in a separately integrated web archive. Given our uncanny coincidence, how can we grasp the relationship between social media blogging and the possibility of participatory co-curating on equal terms? Is there an irreconcilable antagonism between exploited affective labor and a genuinely networked art practice? Or can we move beyond — to use a phrase of yours — a museum crowd “struggling between passivity and overstimulation?”

HS I wrote this in relation to something my friend Carles Guerra noticed already around early 2009; big museums like the Tate were actively expanding their online marketing tools, encouraging people to basically build the museum experience for them by sharing, etc. It was clear to us that audience participation on this level was a tool of extraction and outsourcing, following a logic that has turned online consumers into involuntary data providers overall. Like in the previous example – Heartbleed – the paradigm of participation and generous contribution towards a commons tilts quickly into an asymmetrical relation, where only a minority of participants benefits from everyone’s input, the digital 1 percent reaping the attention value generated by the 99 percent rest.

Brian Kuan Wood put it very beautifully recently: Love is debt, an economy of love and sharing is what you end up with when left to your own devices. However, an economy based on love ends up being an economy of exhaustion – after all, love is utterly exhausting — of deregulation, extraction and lawlessness. And I don’t even want to mention likes, notes and shares, which are the child-friendly, sanitized versions of affect as currency. All is fair in love and war. It doesn’t mean that love isn’t true or passionate, but just that love is usually uneven, utterly unfair and asymmetric, just as capital tends to be distributed nowadays. It would be great to have a little bit less love, a little more infrastructure.

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Essentially I think it makes sense to compare our moment with the end of the twenties in the Soviet Union, when euphoria about electrification, NEP (New Economic Policy), and montage gives way to bureaucracy, secret directives and paranoia. Today this corresponds to the sheer exhilaration of having a World Wide Web being replaced by the drudgery of corporate apps, waterboarding, and “normcore”. I am not trying to say that Stalinism might happen again – this would be plain silly – but trying to acknowledge emerging authoritarian paradigms, some forms of algorithmic consensual governance techniques developed within neoliberal authoritarianism, heavily relying on conformism, “family” values and positive feedback, and backed up by all-out torture and secret legislation if necessary. On the other hand things are also falling apart into uncontrollable love. One also has to remember that people did really love Stalin. People love algorithmic governance too, if it comes with watching unlimited amounts of Game of Thrones. But anyone slightly interested in digital politics and technology is by now acquiring at least basic skills in disappearance and subterfuge.

June 12, 2015

Until recently, Occupy’s chief accomplishment was changing the national conversation by giving Americans a new language—the 99 percent and the 1 percent—to frame the dual crises of income inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics. What began in September 2011 as a small group of protesters camping out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park ignited a national and global movement calling out the ruling class of elites by connecting the dots between corporate and political power. Despite the public’s overwhelming support for its message—that the economic system is rigged for the very few while the majority continue to fall further behind—many faulted Occupy for its failure to produce concrete results.

Yet with the 2016 elections looming and a spirit of economic populism spreading throughout the nation, that view of Occupy’s impact is changing. Inequality and the wealth gap are now core tenets of the Democratic platform, providing a frame for other measurable gains spurred by Occupy. The camps may be gone and Occupy may no longer be visible on the streets, but the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is still there, and growing. What appeared to be a passing phenomenon of protest now looks like the future of U.S. political debate, heralded by tangible policy wins and the new era of activist movements Occupy inaugurated.

One of Occupy’s largely unrecognized victories is the momentum it built for a higher minimum wage. The Occupy protests motivated fast-food workers in New York City to walk off the job in November 2012, sparking a national worker-led movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In 2014, numerous cities and states including four Republican-dominated ones—Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska, and South Dakota—voted for higher pay; 2016 will see more showdowns in New York City and Washington, D.C., and in states like Florida, Maine, and Oregon. From Seattle to Los Angeles to Chicago, some of the country’s largest cities are setting a new economic bar to help low-income workers.

The tidal wave didn’t come from nowhere. The grassroots movement composed of fast-food workers and Walmart employees, convenience-store clerks, and adjunct teachers seized on the energy of Occupy to spark a rebirth of the U.S. labor movement. This renaissance was most recently visible on April 15, when tens of thousands of workers marched in hundreds of cities to demand better pay and conditions. McDonald’s and Walmart have responded with incremental wage hikes, and Senate Democrats this spring called for raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour. As Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, a socialist who rose to prominence with the Occupy movement, put it, “$15 in Seattle is just a beginning. We have an entire world to win.”

Occupy also reshaped the U.S.-environmental movement, which had its rebirth in fall 2011 when 1,200 people were arrested in Washington, D.C., protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. As people gravitated to Occupy encampments, teach-ins, and demonstrations across the country, that energy easily transferred into the fight against climate change. This was especially true on college campuses, where a student-led divestment movement has rid more than $50 billion in fossil-fuel assets from universities and institutional investment funds worldwide.

Occupy prompted a grassroots anti-fracking movement that pushed cities, counties and states to enact bans on the controversial drilling process—from Athens, Ohio, to Mendocino County, California, and in states like New York and Maryland. Last fall, those movements coalesced into the world’s largest climate march when 400,000 protesters descended on New York City to demand robust cuts in emissions and investments in renewable energy. President Obama has responded to the growing pressure by mandating new carbon cuts for power plants, signing a first-ever emissions-slashing deal with China, and vetoing a Republican measure to push through Keystone (although his decision in May granting permission for Shell to drill in the Arctic struck many as a disturbing reversal of his climate promises).

When it comes to money in politics, Occupy also drew mainstream attention to the corrosive influence of wealth on the political process. That helped spur a nationwide movement as 16 state legislatures and more than 600 U.S. towns and cities have passed resolutions to overturn Citizens United and draft a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and money is not speech. In April, the “We the People Amendment” to outlaw corporate personhood was introduced in the House by a Democratic coalition led by Representatives Rick Nolan (Minnesota), Jared Huffman (California), Keith Ellison (Minnesota), Matt Cartwright (Pennsylvania), and Raul Grijalva (Arizona). The message has resonated on both sides of the aisle, as presidential candidates from Clinton to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham call for a new era of campaign-finance reform to remove big money from electoral politics.

The student-debt crisis is another magnified arena where the Occupy protests shouted first and loudest—and in which serious policy shifts are now afoot. Occupy offshoot movements like Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and Debt Collective are tackling America’s $1.3 trillion college-debt conundrum by buying back student debt for pennies on the dollar and forgiving it. Those movements also spurred a rebellion by student debtors, known as the Corinthian 15, who in April celebrated the closure of the for-profit Corinthian College chain, which they had accused of deceptive marketing and deliberately steering students into high-cost loans. In January, President Obama addressed the burgeoning crisis by introducing a $60 billion plan to make all community college free for two years. And in late April, nine Democratic Senators joined a list of 60 Congress members supporting a resolution to institute four-year, debt-free college nationwide—a dramatic departure from piecemeal proposals of the past.

Most significant, perhaps, is how the debate over inequality sparked by Occupy has radically remade the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator-who-is-definitely-not-running-for-president and the party’s most dynamic leader, launched her political career in 2012 with the 99 percent movement’s message of Main Street versus Wall Street. Since entering the Senate, Warren has drafted numerous bills to address income inequality, including the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act that would separate investment banking from commercial banking and the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act that would allow students to refinance college loans at a lower federal rate. By fighting to strengthen financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, break up “too big to fail” banks, and impose stiff taxes on corporations and the wealthy, Warren is the closest thing to an Occupy candidate the movement ever got. And now an army of elected populists in both the Senate and House is unifying around her.

On a local level, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio swept into office last year on a 99-percent-style “tale of two cities” campaign to address income inequality. He has since expanded pre-K education for tens of thousands of students, created municipal ID cards for undocumented immigrants, increased affordable housing, and guaranteed sick days for workers in America’s largest city. De Blasio now leads a national task force of mayors who hope to aggressively tackle the wealth gap in their cities—something scarcely imaginable before Occupy reshuffled the political deck.

Occupy was, at its core, a movement constrained by its own contradictions: filled with leaders who declared themselves leaderless, governed by a consensus-based structure that failed to reach consensus, and seeking to transform politics while refusing to become political. Ironic as it may seem, the impact of the movement that many view only in the rearview mirror is becoming stronger and clearer with time. Since the Great Recession, shareholder profits, CEO pay, and corporate tax breaks have soared while average household wealth continues to sink, college debt skyrockets, living costs increase, real wages decline, and the middle class struggles to survive. The world’s 1 percent now possess almost as much combined wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And while no one in Washington may have the full answer about how to fix income inequality, everyone, it seems, is now grasping for a solution.

February 07, 2015

Since the end of October (and my first arrest on November 3), I've been involved in civil disobedience actions at the gates of Texas-based oil and gas company Crestwood-Midstream to stop the company from storing methane gas in the fragile salt caverns of Seneca Lake. The facility is at the south end of the lake; I live at the north end. The lake supplies the drinking water for about a hundred thousand people. Seneca Lake is fragile, higher in salinity than the other Finger Lakes, likely because of LPG storage in the sixties through the eighties. I've been on the line six times, arrested four of those times, and in a support role three additional times.

The issue is complicated and layered, not one I would have chosen. It chose me.

I wonder if politics works this way a lot of the time. I wonder if there is or will be something about climate politics that makes the way it will choose us to engage different from other political matters. What makes this seem likely is the largeness and seeming intractability of the problem: it is already happening. Binding global agreements seem unlikely and already like too little too late. We get trapped into the worst sorts of individualizing approaches that reduce action to one's consumer choices or ethical stance, feeling responsible.

The expanded storage facility would be part of the fracking infrastructure. Allowing it to be built undermines efforts to ban fracking (or maintain the ban in NY), adding to the ability of the industry to say things like "well, X is already in place." Methane in particular has an even greater warming effect than carbon. So this isn't a NIMBY issue. The point is no fracking here, no fracking anywhere.

We have to insist on no fracking anywhere as a necessary component of climate politics: fossil fuels must stay in the ground (which would be helped by not calling them "fuel" anymore or even "fossils" since "fossils" seem to be things that are out of the ground and within human containers, generally, museums).

One divides into two -- in this case, the struggle over protecting one lake divides into that plus another struggle against fracking. The struggle against fracking divides into itself plus the struggle to mitigate rather than compound climate change. And this struggle, to be the struggle it is, is a struggle against capitalism. If there is to be any mitigation of global climate change, a massive sector of the capitalist economy -- the oil and gas industry, which includes, then, petro-chemicals, shipping and transport, the financial markets associated with speculating on oil and gas as commodities as well as other stocks and investments, automobiles, roads, the component industries of all of these -- has to be shut down. This means lots of job loss: in a sense the dismantling of the carbon-combustion complex is akin to the de-industrialization of the seventies and eighties. Instead of jobs and processes being moved elsewhere, though, they would be eliminated. Yes, renewables, thought broadly in ways that connect with renewing the capacities and resources of workers who have had to make their livings in the industry threatening us all.

The array of pipeline, storage, and water struggles are salvos against the oil and gas sector of the capitalist economy, attacks on its base, the energy system that supports it. It makes me wonder about the fruitfulness of an analogy with the early days of organized working class struggle as Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto, the days when workers are beginning to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels write: "The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers."

In addition to learning a lot about propane, butane, and methane, the economics of the oil and gas industry, the dangers associated with the storage and transport of methane and LPGs, I've learned more about engaged collective action, maybe even the way in which an "ever-expanding union" may produce itself in practices of comradeship where one finds oneself acting in solidarity with a whole slew of people one barely knows and may not have much in common with outside the action (which itself grows to become the focus of life rather than what is added in when one 'has time' -- really, none of us have time, individually or collectively).

I say 'engaged collective action' because I am reluctant to say "activism," feeling uneasy about the term (although, interestingly, the local paper, covering a rally I helped organize last weekend, called the over 300 people who came out in 17 degree weather to march in Geneva, many for the first time, 'activists'). I am also reluctant to say "grassroots," in part because it starts to suggest to me a chain of associations that leads to unrooted cosmopolitan intellectuals, an environment that I also inhabit, but again not in those terms.

Since I am in this vein of saying what I am not saying, I'll add that I don't think of the actions of the group We Are Seneca Lake via the binary of 'local' versus 'global,' a binary into which some of my friends and comrades want to assimilate it. Problems with the local/global binary include the rendering of sacrifice zones into localities while the global persists as a realm of functioning success, the production of some eyes, opinions, and attention at what needs to be "gotten" for something to matter (and here plays into the worse tendencies of communicative capitalism), and the utter failure to take seriously the material interconnections of infrastructure, capitalism, state, and climate that intellectuals in particular have claimed to be focusing on for over a decade.

A few lessons:

1. Footwear matters.

2. Wear sunscreen.

3. Wear layers.

4. There are divisions of labor that make people happy: people like making contributions that matter, such as providing care and sustenance by bringing food, providing technical, legal, and creative services, providing good humor, energy, calm, information. Many of us like being foot-soldiers, banner holders, reliable cadre. "Just tell me where to go and I will be there. You can count on me." Being one of many -- of the 40 arrested on the big day, of the 15 who stood in the cold and wind the whole fucking day, of the 12 from the first arrests, of the 6 who went to jail -- gives us a sense of purpose that we can't give ourselves by ourselves: "how do I help?"

5. Leadership gives people the confidence to do more than they thought they could. Organizers channel and reinforce this confidence, letting it intensify and spread.

6. It makes sense to look for allies. (Honestly, this is where the insane politics of outrage of the typing left leaves me cold, much colder than 12 degrees and wind on the west side of Seneca Lake. In the name of a rejection of norms, the politics of outrage incites the expression of rhetorical alliance within media networks, reinforcing the primacy of these networks and these expressions. That this is in the name of the rejection of norms makes sense: in replace of these norms is a super-ego injunction that we can never satisfy and that gets stronger with every attempt to satisfy it.)

7. Comradeship is a general sensibility cultivated out of commitment to a common end. Arising out repeated practices, comradeship traverses and transcends specific motives for engagement.

February 01, 2015

"Fourth Ward City Councilor Ken Camera was among those who spoke from city hall’s steps. He said Seneca Lake could face destruction if the protests fail.

The crowd, still waving signs, stretched from the sidewalk out to the middle of Castle Street. Occasional passersby asked why they were there, and some drivers honked as they went past.

“Without the lake, Geneva and the surrounding areas and towns will lose what makes them unique,” Camera told the crowd. “For us, the lake is not a business. It is a part of our home that we need to fight for. ... We’re going to be on the barricades until we win.”

Couchon called the protests a people’s movement.

“There was nothing to do but go home or fight, and we fight,” he said of activists’ reaction to Crestwood’s plans. “We fight for our right to determine what’s best for our people, as we do not accept that corporations are people or that corporations have the right to determine what’s best for our communities.”

Howie Hawkins, a longtime activist and the 2014 Green Party candidate for governor, was a late addition to the roster of speakers. He pledged to join the protesters, and he linked their efforts to earlier protests against nuclear power and to the larger energy debate. The Crestwood protests, he said, are part of the nation’s decision to either continue embracing 19th century energy sources that pollute or to turn toward green power.

January 22, 2015

In February 1960 four black college students sat down at a white-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in 15 cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to 54 cities in nine states. By April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Four students did something and America changed. Even they, however, couldn’t know what the result would be.

One of the four, Franklin McCain, would say years later, “What people won’t talk (about), what people don’t like to remember is that the success of that movement in Greensboro is probably attributed to no more than eight or 10 people. I can say this: when the television camerasstopped rolling, the folk left. I mean, there were just a very faithful few. McNeil and I can’t count the nights and evenings that we literally cried because we couldn’t get people to help us staff a picket line.”

Four people. . . . That’s you and the students on either side of you and the one in front of you. That’s all you need to make history sometimes.

I knew a civil rights leader named Julius Hobson. He used to say that he could start a revolution with six men and telephone booth. He seldom had more than ten at one of his demonstrations. Once in a church with about 30 parishioners, he commented, “If I had that many people behind me, I’d be president.”

But between 1960 and 1964, Julius Hobson ran more than 80 picket lines on approximately 120 retail stores in downtown DC, resulting in employment for some 5,000 blacks. He initiated a campaign that resulted in the first hiring of black bus drivers by DC Transit. Hobson forced the hiring of the first black auto salesmen and dairy employees and started a campaign to combat job discrimination by the public utilities.

Hobson directed campaigns against private apartment buildings that discriminated against blacks and led a demonstration by 4,500 people to city hall that encouraged the DC to end housing segregation. He conducted a lie-in at the Washington Hospital Center that produced a jail term for himself and helped to end segregation in the hospitals. His arrest in a sit-in at the Benjamin Franklin School in 1964 helped lead to the desegregation of private business schools. In 1967, Julius Hobson won, after a long and very lonely court battle that left him deeply in debt, a suit that outlawed the discrimination in teaching, teacher segregation, and the unfair distribution of spending, books and supplies. It also led, indirectly, to the resignation of the school ‘superintendent and first elections of a city school board. A few years later he started a third party that got him elected to the city council. And a few years ago that party became the local Green party.

...

To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero tolerance towards the weak and the young, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel — the courage to emigrate from one’s own ways in order to meet the future not as just a right but as a frontier.